Power to the Developer
I like to invest in post-product companies where the product is already being validated in the market and the founders are “scratching their own itch” — they’re in an industry where they see something so broken that they have to leave what they’re doing to go and fix it.
Founders don’t need to be dreaming big from day one; sometimes they’re heads down working on the solution and then one day they look up and realize they’re onto a massive opportunity — but they need help getting it to its full potential. That’s usually when they get an email from me. ;)
The software market is super crowded right now; in order to fight through the noise, you have to crack distribution. There has to be a better way to scale than relying on expensive sales and marketing teams to get through the CTO’s door. Everyone is talking about bottoms-up, self-serve growth, but I’m also interested in conventional distribution approaches people may have passed over, like channel partnerships, technical integration, and best-of-breed stacks.
What I’m investing in: Founders who are motivated to remove the frustrations that come up in any job, in any industry.
It's still too hard to transition to the frontend cloud.
Guillermo Rauch founded Vercel to automate the process and evangelize the transition from the LAMPstack to the JAMstack.
After owning and operating a barbershop, Dave Salvant and Songe LaRon set out to modernize an industry that had been left behind by technology.
They built Squire, an easy-to-use, mobile scheduling and payment platform, exclusively for barber shops. Read more about their story here.
The largest category of enterprise software remains underpenetrated: HR SaaS.
By juggling the breadth and depth of product expectations, Jordi Romero, Bernat Ferrero and Pau Ramon Revilla set out to build an integrated HR, Payroll and Finance platform that's usable by all employees and accessible across borders. Read more about Factorial here.
Carrot founder and CEO Tammy Sun identified that financial access is the biggest issue to fertility treatment and created a benefits-and-payment solution that enables equal access to family planning.
Read more about why we invested in Carrot here.
I believe software can make people’s lives better and economically improve their situation as well.
